The financial chaos and decline of America has been driven by three forces: Free trade, the Federal Reserve, and the War in Iraq.

The combination of policies here, all deregulations geared to ruling corporate elites, has resulted in a complete and utter disaster for this once great country.

If the takedown was not intentional and perfidious then the sheer stupidity, criminality, and irresponsiblity in these three areas is surely amongst the worst, and most costly, in our history.

First, a truly free and costless trade can only occur between nations of similar standards of living and democracy, otherwise the higher standard nations will lose via labor arbitrage and the First World will gradually disappear - exactly what we are witnessing. Without compensating tariffs appropriate for a greatly disparate and undemocratic world, and acting to preserve First Worlds standards, the dismal results were predicable.

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GATT and NAFTA embody corporate economist’s amoral "efficiency" and not a democractically determined efficiency. This means we reward the greater slave, punish the better society and, in the process, create both global oligarchy and oligopoly – i.e., the worst of worlds.

As a result of trade policy removed from the people (we don’t elect our trade representative) we now owe our existence to China – a brutal dictatorship. China is now able to extort our nation and hold us hostage, all due to the absence of a rational tariff policy fit for a disparate world allowing for gross trade imbalances to rise. In addition, having lost our manufacturing capabilites, we are forced to import nearly all our goods via fossil fuel conveyances over many thousands of miles and so contribute to climate change and hasten further eco-ruin.

So "free trade" policies have been a disaster.

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Second, the so-called "Federal Reserve" with its privatized, exclusive, debt-money creation and destruction powers, and ability to set interest rates and monetary policy is nothing less than a money mafia – i.e., an "independent" institution run by a handful of banking families who managed to steal our constitutional "purse powers" in a legislative coup in 1913.

Independent of whom you ask? The people, of course.

A private ability to set rates, and the power of insiders to know the direction of rate changes before others, is a license to print money and corrupt the markets, not to mention all those parasitic loans to hedge funds and vulture capitalists busy tearing our economy apart.

From this unconstitutional cabal we are forced to borrow every dollar we need to run our government and our lives. It is a grotesque perversion of democracy for which we are now paying, once again, in spades. The founders of this country, who warned us of this banking predicament, are surely rolling over in their graves.

Lastly, the immensely costly war in Iraq is nothing more than a criminal enterprise and a racket enriching friends of the Bush regime and fulfilling imperial neo-con sociopathic fantasies. That Bush and Cheney have not been impeaced for lying to the American people about this war is a terrible failure of Congress, on both sides of the isle.

The carnage of this pre-planned, predatory, war includes a million lives lost and immense damage to Iraqi society, a trillion dollars wasted, millions of terrorists created, and the loss of American prestige around the world – i.e. another utter disaster.

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The question today is can we recover any semblance of a better past from this triple whammy of oligarchic idiocy and predatory criminality? Will we be completely controlled via another globalist coup over our lives, or, will these disasters create the national will to restore effective democracy in our live and institutions?

The only positive about this emerging panic and depression is the possiblity for ground-up reform and recapture of our society from ruling elites now in full-mode panic about the prospect of losing their ill-gained powers. Our representatives now have to develop a spine and we, the people, have to re-capture our media before real reform can begin.

"Rob Kall's writings on the "bottom-up" revolution have real potential to show people that they can hold power accountable and improve justice. A book on this subject could help to repair the economic, legal, social, and political fabric of the United States."

Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week and Scripps Howard News Service.

Author Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes the mainstream media narrative.